John Gathly

Did this book have an editor?

Revisado: 05-08-24

I only got this book, because I'm trying to study the period immediately after WW2 (1945-1950), and this is surprisingly difficult to find. There are so many books about WWII and so many books about the Cold War years. This little section in the middle, where the world was destroyed and had to be built back up doesn't have many books devoted just to this period. Luckily, this means I get to skip all the parts of this book before 1945, which I can only imagine are as annoyingly detailed with irrelevant details as this section is. David McCullough seems to have been blown away by all the primary sources available to him on Truman, after writing about Teddy Roosevelt and others, and thus thought he needed to include them all. Mostly, it's good, since I want this level of detail on some things, but getting all the details about who ate or drank what, and how they liked this or that meal, maybe an editor should have cut some of that. Also, for starting a book right as Roosevelt died, I sure did have to sit through narrator Nelson Runger mispronouncing that very well known name "Roosevelt" an unbelievable number of times. Once or twice, the author uses FDR, and I'm so grateful. Also, I don't know when this audiobook was recorded, but instead of cutting out or simply not recording the pauses between sections of text, I can hear the narrator breathing and swallowing before he goes on. These are minor gripes and the book is still excellent, but it was irritating.

also, seems odd to go on a lengthy diatribe about Stalin causing famine in 1933, using the most inflated numbers available, and then turn to Churchill in the same room, and not mention the Bengal famine he cause, killing up to 4 million people. If you're going to mention one, maybe mention the other? Both men had justifications for their actions, which you can present even if you don't accept one and do the other. Though, Churchill did make his racism pretty explicit in the quote: "They are a beastly people with a beastly religion. The famine was their own fault for breeding like rabbits." So, it's not like it's undocumented history or anything. Anyway, these are just the subtle ways that popular history books introduce political bias into what should be just history. Present all of it, especially in a book that spends pages upon pages on the most minute details.

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Encourage scientific curiosity

Revisado: 04-10-24

This book is designed to awaken scientific curiosity. All young people should be encouraged to read it. Every story point that comes up is a "how could this happen" scientific question that the protagonist has to figure out scientifically, bringing the reader along at each step.

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There was no need to do a Peter Lorre impression

Revisado: 01-16-24

This is a classic and the narrator does well to make it his own, except for some reason, for the Cairo character, he just does a flat-out Peter Lorre impression. I mean, Peter Lorre is great and I love the movie adaptation of this book too, but that was unnecessary. Still a great book and a fun audiobook experience.

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Pronounces 'celt' wrong

Revisado: 10-01-23

Just look up how to pronounce things before recording the audio. It's so easy these days. That's the narrator. The author is ok, but weird to throw in judgements of ancient peoples long dead, the Gauls, while contrasting them with the Romans as better, considering the entire empire was built on slavery and mass violence.

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What is this?

Revisado: 05-29-22

This author seems to just be summarizing other popular books I've already read. There appears to be no original research done for this. this feels like a term paper that someone tried to write the weekend before it was due. I already got the detailed accounts from the original authors, so have no use for her summaries. Instead of this author, read Greg Grandin, David Harvey, Michelle Alexander, Naomi Klein, etc. who she is summarizing.

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good overview, but...

Revisado: 05-02-22

This narrator really struggles to pronounce many things correctly, which is annoying. When they are recording their narrative and they come to a word or name they don't know, why don't they spend a minute looking up how to pronounce it? Is there no quality control?

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narrated by a robot. author is somewhat confused.

Revisado: 12-23-20

This isn't bad for a short introduction to different theories of the origins of capitalism. It does good overviews and is indeed short. However, the criticisms within miss out on something fairly critical in understanding the method and intention of the authors criticized. When Adam Smith or Karl Marx is not covering the wide variations of pre-modern development, and every single conceivable case involving the roots that later developed into capitalism, it is not because they didn't know they existed or missed them in their analysis. They are deliberately omitted because the authors have a specific goal in their texts, which are polemical. They are modeling the outlines of a process over time to highlight certain key elements of that process and to create a model.

These systems are made up of people and regions that have differences, but the goal is to simplify that as much as possible to show the general trends. Adam Smith is trying to show the model the system as a bunch of buyers and sellers in a market. They clearly had other roles, purposes, tasks and obligations within the political economy of the day, but he's trying to model why a mercantile system of protectionist tariffs actually leads to worse outcomes for people in all countries than allowing different nations to do whatever they did best and compete globally to get the best and cheapest products for all. Anything outside of that polemic are not relevant to his analysis, so they are left out.

Marx is taking Adam Smith (and David Ricardo and others) and using their analysis of the 'everyone is a buyer and seller' model to refocus his analysis on the role of production, and the relationships there, and how the production of commodities is the basis of the capitalist mode of production, and working out from there. His modeling of the pre-capitalist period is trying to trace how it gets to that point, commodity production dictating everything else, and thus uses broad strokes of feudal development to show the general trend. He's also using the same models of previous authors of political economy like Adam Smith as a beginning to trace what they get right and wrong, so is also bound to the limits of their models in his own. He's not setting out to write a history of all variations that may have occurred earlier than most others, or to explore how actually there were some pre-capitalist regions that were slightly ahead of others in the forms of pre-capitalist development. The same is true of Brenner's peasantry arguments and world systems theory. These are simplified models of development, not histories.

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US Empire always good, always justified.

Revisado: 11-17-19

This is a "history" book written from the perspective that everything the US and Western Europe did to expand the US empire after WWII was good and justified. All the death that went into creating markets friendly to US and Western capital, all the people fed to the US capital machine as third world labor are apparently "free", but labor used to fuel Soviet expansion is the only real problem. US controlled everywhere they had military presence, and built up a vast imperial base system in every country, but that doesn't count. It is only evil and bad when the Soviets control the territory they fought over in the war. Every territory the US controlled was good freedomy freedom and everything the Soviet empire did to control their empire was terrible and bad. Both the US and the Soviet empires committed mass murder and tried to control territory, but for some reason, only one side is presented as a negative here, and the other is presented as always entirely justified. Any failures of the West are considered something that couldn't possibly be helped, and presented as something that no one can legitimately criticize. Every move of the Soviets is considered to be deliberate evil perpetrated by evil monsters. Two empires, both doing what empires do, seeking power and territory. Any real history could present both empires and their deeds without making moral judgements. This is not that history.

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brief overview with very American centered focus

Revisado: 09-22-19

This course goes briefly over a high level view of the war, hardly any "social history" even though it says it contains that. This was recorded in the 90s, and is very much from the American perspective, so Thomas Childers goes out of his way to justify Truman's crime against humanity in dropping the atomic bombs on civilians in Japan. He vaguely hints at the idea that Truman struggled over this weighty decision, though he did not. It tries very hard to justify this atrocity as something needed to end the war, which it wasn't. It pretends that the goal was to bring the Japanese military to their senses, but the bomb's purpose was as a demonstration to the Soviets. The US did not want them to enter Japan, already aware that where they were occupied in Europe they were not planning on leaving. The war had left the US and the Soviets as the last standing powers in the world, and the US was preparing for that new reality. Japan was already defeated, no matter how delusional the Japanese were, and a blockade would have ended the war with no further US casualties, and was proposed at the time. Many generals at the time were against the use of the bomb. It was not needed. It's a pity that this professor was still needing to justify an atrocity so many years after the fact. Other than that, though, it's a decent enough overview of the war from the American perspective, and the professor has a nice condemnation of the cost of war in the final lecture.

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Excellent histoary that doesn't hide the ball

Revisado: 06-02-19

Unlike many of the texts available on audible that deal with soviet history, this one was refreshing for being clear from the outset that it isn't writing an unbiased history, but is clear in its point of view from page one that it is a story about fighting the global socialist revolution, which the author considers an unqualified heroic action. When you don't hide your bias, it becomes easier to take your history as it is, instead of being annoyed by the clear point of view when unacknowledged by so many other authors. A strange thing occurs, also, when you do this, the author is able to acknowledge alternative points of view, simply from the fact that they are openly displaying their own, and the history is actually more complete. When you state outright that the British Empire and its brutal murder across the globe is cool with you, you don't have to make fuzzy dodges that try and imply some intrinsic quality that justifies the trail of blood that is the history of empire. You simply state outright that you don't care, and you're on this side. You're a disgusting imperialist asshole with a broken system of morality, but it's refreshing nonetheless.

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